The Last Tycoon

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  “Almost everything.”

  “Yes – almost. A few little things.”

  He would have to know what they were. She would tell him tomorrow. He doubted – he wanted to doubt – if there had been a maze of philandering: a fixation had held her to The Man, the king, firmly and long. Three years of a highly anomalous position – one foot in the palace and one in the background. “You had to laugh a lot,” she said. “I learnt to laugh a lot.”

  “He could have married you – like Mrs Simpson,” Stahr said in protest.

  “Oh, he was married. And he wasn’t a romantic.” She stopped herself.

  “Am I?”

  “Yes,” she said, unwillingly, as if she were laying down a trump. “Part of you is. You’re three or four different men, but each of them out in the open. Like all Americans.”

  “Don’t start trusting Americans too implicitly,” he said smiling. “They may be out in the open, but they change very fast.”

  She looked concerned.

  “Do they?”

  “Very fast and all at once,” he said, “and nothing ever changes them back.”

  “You frighten me. I always had a great sense of security with Americans.”

  She seemed suddenly so alone that he took her hand.

  “Where will we go tomorrow?” he said. “Maybe up in the mountains. I’ve got everything to do tomorrow, but I won’t do any of it. We can start at four and get there by afternoon.”

  “I’m not sure. I seem to be a little mixed up. This doesn’t seem to be quite the girl who came out to California for a new life.”

  He could have said it then, said, “It is a new life,” for he knew it was, he knew he could not let her go now – but something else said to sleep on it as an adult, no romantic. And not to tell her till tomorrow. Still she was looking at him, her eyes wandering from his forehead to his chin and back again, and then up and down once more, with that odd, slowly waving motion of her head.

  …It is your chance, Stahr. Better take it now. This is your girl. She can save you, she can worry you back to life. She will take looking after and you will grow strong to do it. But take her now – tell her and take her away. Neither of you knows it, but far away over the night The American has changed his plans. At this moment his train is speeding through Albuquerque; the schedule is accurate. The engineer is on time. In the morning he will be here.

  …The chauffeur turned up the hill to Kathleen’s house. It seemed warm even in darkness – wherever he had been near here was by way of being an enchanted place for Stahr: this limousine, the rising house at the beach, the very distances they had already covered together over the sprawled city. The hill they climbed now gave forth a sort of glow, a sustained sound that struck his soul alert with delight.

  As he said goodbye he felt again that it was impossible to leave her, even for a few hours. There were only ten years between them, but he felt that madness about it akin to the love of an ageing man for a young girl. It was a deep and desperate time need, a clock ticking with his heart, and it urged him, against the whole logic of his life, to walk past her into the house now and say, “This is for ever.”

  Kathleen waited, irresolute herself – pink and silver frost waiting to melt with spring. She was a European, humble in the face of power, but there was a fierce self-respect that would only let her go so far. She had no illusions about the considerations that swayed princes.

  “We’ll go to the mountains tomorrow,” said Stahr. Many thousands of people depended on his balanced judgement – you can suddenly blunt a quality you have lived by for twenty years.

  He was very busy the next morning, Saturday. At two o’clock when he came from luncheon, there was a stack of telegrams – a company ship was lost in the Arctic; a star was in disgrace; a writer was suing for one million dollars. Jews were dead miserably beyond the sea. The last telegram stared up at him:

  I was married at noon today. Goodbye; and on a sticker attached, Send your answer by Western Union Telegram.

  Chapter 6

  I knew nothing about any of this. I went up to Lake Louise, and when I came back didn’t go near the studio. I think I would have started East in mid-August – if Stahr hadn’t called me up one day at home.

  “I want you to arrange something, Celia – I want to meet a Communist Party member.”

  “Which one?” I asked, somewhat startled.

  “Any one.”

  “Haven’t you got plenty out there?”

  “I mean one of their organizers – from New York.”

  The summer before I had been all politics – I could probably have arranged a meeting with Harry Bridges.* But my boy had been killed in an auto accident after I went back to college, and I was out of touch with such things. I had heard there was a man from The New Masses* around somewhere.

  “Will you promise him immunity?” I asked, joking.

  “Oh, yes,” Stahr answered seriously. “I won’t hurt him. Get one that can talk – tell him to bring one of his books along.”

  He spoke as if he wanted to meet a member of the “I AM” cult.*

  “Do you want a blonde or a brunette?”

  “Oh, get a man,” he said hastily.

  Hearing Stahr’s voice cheered me up – since I had barged in on Father it had all seemed a paddling-about in thin spittle. Stahr changed everything about it – changed the angle from which I saw it, changed the very air.

  “I don’t think your father ought to know,” he said. “Can we pretend the man is a Bulgarian musician or something?”

  “Oh, they don’t dress up any more,” I said.

  It was harder to arrange than I thought – Stahr’s negotiations with the Writers’ Guild, which had continued over a year, were approaching a dead end. Perhaps they were afraid of being corrupted, and I was asked what Stahr’s “proposition” was. Afterwards Stahr told me that he prepared for the meeting by running off the Russian revolutionary films that he had in his film library at home. He also ran off Doctor Caligari and Salvador Dalí’s Le Chien andalou,* possibly suspecting that they had a bearing on the matter. He had been startled by the Russian films back in the Twenties, and on Wylie White’s suggestion he had had the script department get him up a two-page “treatment” of the Communist Manifesto.*

  But his mind was closed on the subject. He was a rationalist who did his own reasoning without benefit of books – and he had just managed to climb out of a thousand years of Jewry into the late eighteenth century. He could not bear to see it melt away – he cherished the parvenu’s passionate loyalty to an imaginary past.

  The meeting took place in what I called the “processed-leather room” – it was one of six done for us by a decorator from Sloane’s years ago, and the term stuck in my head. It was the most decorator’s room: an angora wool carpet the colour of dawn, the most delicate grey imaginable – you hardly dared walk on it – and the silver panelling and leather tables and creamy pictures and slim fragilities looked so easy to stain that we could not breathe hard in there, though it was wonderful to look into from the door when the windows were open and the curtains whimpered querulously against the breeze. It was a lineal descendant of the old American parlour that used to be closed except on Sundays. But it was exactly the room for the occasion, and I hoped that whatever happened would give it character and make it henceforth part of our house.

  Stahr arrived first. He was white and nervous and troubled – except for his voice, which was always quiet and full of consideration. There was a brave personal quality in the way he would meet you – he would walk right up to you and put aside something that was in the way, and grow to know you all over as if he couldn’t help himself. I kissed him for some reason, and took him into the processed-leather room.

  “When do you go back to college?” he asked.

  We had been over this fascinating ground before.

>   “Would you like me if I were a little shorter?” I asked. “I could wear low heels and plaster down my hair.”

  “Let’s have dinner tonight,” he suggested. “People will think I’m your father but I don’t mind.”

  “I love old men,” I assured him. “Unless the man has a crutch, I feel it’s just a boy-and-girl affair.”

  “Have you had many of those?”

  “Enough.”

  “People fall in and out of love all the time, don’t they?”

  “Every three years or so, Fanny Brice* says. I just read it in the paper.”

  “I wonder how they manage it,” he said. “I know it’s true because I see them. But they look so convinced every time. And then suddenly they don’t look convinced. But they get convinced all over.”

  “You’ve been making too many movies.”

  “I wonder if they’re as convinced the second time or the third time or the fourth time,” he persisted.

  “More each time,” I said. “Most of all the last time.”

  He thought this over and seemed to agree.

  “I suppose so. Most of all the last time.”

  I didn’t like the way he said this, and I suddenly saw that under the surface he was miserable.

  “It’s a great nuisance,” he said. “It’ll be better when it’s over.”

  “Wait a minute! Perhaps pictures are in the wrong hands.”

  Brimmer, the Party Member, was announced, and going to meet him I slid over to the door on one of those gossamer throw rugs and practically into his arms.

  He was a nice-looking man, this Brimmer – a little on the order of Spencer Tracy, but with a stronger face and a wider range of reactions written up in it. I couldn’t help thinking, as he and Stahr smiled and shook hands and squared off, that they were two of the most alert men I had ever seen. They were very conscious of each other immediately – both as polite to me as you please, but with a softening of the ends of their sentences when they turned in my direction.

  “What are you people trying to do?” demanded Stahr. “You’ve got my young men all upset.”

  “That keeps them awake, doesn’t it?” said Brimmer.

  “First we let half a dozen Russians study the plant,” said Stahr. “As a model plant, you understand. And then you try to break up the unity that makes it a model plant.”

  “The unity?” Brimmer repeated. “Do you mean what’s known as The Company Spirit?”

  “Oh, not that,” said Stahr, impatiently. “It seems to be me you’re after. Last week a writer came into my office – a drunk – a man who’s been floating around for years just two steps out of the bughouse – and began telling me my business.”

  Brimmer smiled.

  “You don’t look to me like a man who could be told his business, Mr Stahr.”

  They would both have tea. When I came back, Stahr was telling a story about the Warner Brothers and Brimmer was laughing with him.

  “I’ll tell you another one,” Stahr said. “Balanchine the Russian dancer* had them mixed up with the Ritz Brothers.* He didn’t know which ones he was training and which ones he was working for. He used to go around saying, ‘I cannot train these Warner Brothers to dance.’”

  It looked like a quiet afternoon. Brimmer asked him why the producers didn’t back the anti-Nazi League.

  “Because of you people,” said Stahr. “It’s your way of getting at the writers. In the long view you’re wasting your time. Writers are children – even in normal times they can’t keep their minds on their work.”

  “They’re the farmers in this business,” said Brimmer pleasantly. “They grow the grain but they’re not in at the feast. Their feeling towards the producer is like the farmers’ resentment of the city fellow.”

  I was wondering about Stahr’s girl – whether it was all over between them. Later, when I heard the whole thing from Kathleen, standing in the rain in a wretched road called Goldwyn Avenue, I figured out that this must have been a week after she sent him the telegram. She couldn’t help the telegram. The man got off the train unexpectedly and walked her to the registry office without a flicker of doubt that this was what she wanted. It was eight in the morning, and Kathleen was in such a daze that she was chiefly concerned about how to get the telegram to Stahr. In theory you could stop and say, “Listen, I forgot to tell you, but I met a man.” But this track had been laid down so thoroughly, with such confidence, such struggle, such relief, that when it came along, suddenly cutting across the other, she found herself on it like a car on a closed switch. He watched her write the telegram, looking directly at it across the table, and she hoped he couldn’t read it upside down…

  When my mind came back into the room, they had destroyed the poor writers – Brimmer had gone so far as to admit they were “unstable”.

  “They are not equipped for authority,” said Stahr. “There is no substitute for will. Sometimes you have to fake will when you don’t feel it at all.”

  “I’ve had that experience.”

  “You have to say, ‘It’s got to be like this – no other way’ – even if you’re not sure. A dozen times a week that happens to me. Situations where there is no real reason for anything. You pretend there is.”

  “All leaders have felt that,” said Brimmer. “Labour leaders, and certainly military leaders.”

  “So I’ve had to take an attitude in this Guild matter. It looks to me like a try for power, and all I am going to give the writers is money.”

  “You give some of them very little money. Thirty dollars a week.”

  “Who gets that?” asked Stahr, surprised.

  “The ones that are commodities and easy to replace.”

  “Not on my lot,” said Stahr.

  “Oh, yes,” said Brimmer. “Two men in your shorts department get thirty dollars a week.”

  “Who?”

  “Man named Ransome – man named O’Brien.”

  Stahr and I smiled together.

  “Those are not writers,” said Stahr. “Those are cousins of Cecilia’s father.”

  “There are some in other studios,” said Brimmer.

  Stahr took his teaspoon and poured himself some medicine from a little bottle.

  “What’s a fink?” he asked suddenly.

  “A fink? That’s a strike-breaker or a company tec.”

  “I thought so,” said Stahr. “I’ve got a fifteen-hundred-dollar writer that every time he walks through the commissary keeps saying ‘Fink!’ behind other writers’ chairs. If he didn’t scare hell out of them, it’d be funny.”

  Brimmer laughed.

  “I’d like to see that,” he said.

  “You wouldn’t like to spend a day with me over there?” suggested Stahr.

  Brimmer laughed with genuine amusement.

  “No, Mr Stahr. But I don’t doubt but that I’d be impressed. I’ve heard you’re one of the hardest-working and most efficient men in the entire West. It’d be a privilege to watch you, but I’m afraid I’ll have to deny myself.”

  Stahr looked at me.

  “I like your friend,” he said. “He’s crazy, but I like him.” He looked closely at Brimmer: “Born on this side?”

  “Oh, yes. Several generations.”

  “Many of them like you?”

  “My father was a Baptist minister.”

  “I mean, are many of them Reds? I’d like to meet this big Jew that tried to blow over the Ford factory. What’s his name—”

  “Frankensteen?”*

  “That’s the man. I guess some of you believe in it.”

  “Quite a few,” said Brimmer drily.

  “Not you,” said Stahr.

  A shade of annoyance floated across Brimmer’s face.

  “Oh, yes,” he said.

  “Oh, no,” said Stahr. “Maybe you
did once.”

  Brimmer shrugged his shoulders.

  “Perhaps the boot’s on the other foot,” he said. “At the bottom of your heart, Mr Stahr, you know I’m right.”

  “No,” said Stahr, “I think it’s a bunch of tripe.”

  “…you think to yourself, ‘He’s right,’ but you think the system will last out your time.”

  “You don’t really think you’re going to overthrow the government.”

  “No, Mr Stahr. But we think perhaps you are.”

  They were nicking at each other – little pricking strokes like men do sometimes. Women do it, too, but it is a joined battle then with no quarter. But it is not pleasant to watch men do it, because you never know what’s next. Certainly it wasn’t improving the tonal associations of the room for me, and I moved them out the French window into our golden-yellow California garden.

  It was midsummer, but fresh water from the gasping sprinklers made the lawn glitter like spring. I could see Brimmer look at it with a sigh in his glance – a way they have. He opened up big outside – inches taller than I thought and broad-shouldered. He reminded me a little of Superman when he takes off his spectacles. I thought he was as attractive as men can be who don’t really care about women as such. We played a round-robin game of ping-pong, and he handled his bat well. I heard Father come into the house singing that damned ‘Little Girl, You’ve Had a Busy Day’, and then breaking off, as if he remembered we weren’t speaking any more. It was half-past six – my car was standing in the drive, and I suggested we go down to the Trocadero for dinner.

  Brimmer had that look that Father O’Ney had that time in New York when he turned his collar around and went with Father and me to the Russian Ballet. He hadn’t quite ought to be here. When Bernie, the photographer, who was waiting there for some big game or other, came up to our table, he looked trapped – Stahr made Bernie go away, and I would like to have had the picture.

  Then, to my astonishment, Stahr had three cocktails, one after the other.

  “Now I know you’ve been disappointed in love,” I said.